Washington - Augusto Lopez-Claros comment on World Bank blog: Equality of opportunity as an engine of prosperity

Augusto Lopez-Claros (director of global indicators at the World Bank) will be one of the speakers at ebbf’s 25th anniversary annual event taking place in Barcelona in just over one month. He recently wrote an interesting article on the World Bank’s portal titled “Equality of opportunity as an engine of prosperity”.A few highlights from the article below“Inequalities in education, for instance, artificially reduce the pool of talent which societies can draw from; by excluding qualified girls from the educational stream and promoting less qualified boys, the average amount of human capital in a country will be reduced and this will have an adverse impact on economic performance”

and

“with greater female power within the household there will be higher investments in the health and education of children, thereby planting the seeds for the accumulation of human capital in the next generation.”

And his article ends with

“Prosperity involves more than just increasing and distributing wealth. Human well-being includes social, cultural, ethical and spiritual dimensions. The diversity and additional perspectives contributed by presently marginalized groups can, when allowed full expression and participation, enrich the community and society and add to collective prosperity. Equality of opportunity not only prevents a waste of human resources and capacities, but also opens the potential to even higher levels of social and economic well-being.”